I'm well aware of Lynch's claims that he never wanted to reveal the culprit. To me, this always sounded like a post-facto excuse for the second series' plummeting ratings and general quality. It's hard to credit, really. Dale Cooper from the get-go was set up as the ultimate lawman, a detective with an near-supernatural crime solving skills. To say that he would never have been able to solve the case of a small town murder is a bit of a stretch. The reveal of Laura's killer did not wreck the show. What killed the show was general neglect and lack of quality control. Laura's murder was only a way in. If enough care had been taken to develop the other storylines, the viewers would have kept coming back for more. The Windom Earl plotline, foe instance, was a good idea, badly executed.laughingpinecone wrote:How do you go from the well-known "we weren't going to reveal the culprit" to "Leland would have been caught anyway"? They weren't going to reveal the culprit, so no pov character would've found out who the culprit was, I've done my fair share of leaps of logic but I really don't think this is one of them.judasbooth wrote: To say that Cooper would never have solved the Palmer case is a bit of a stretch. Saying that the murder was solved by Laura's spirit is an even bigger one. Remember, around the time Cooper finally apprehended Leland, the show was still (mostly) grounded in a sort of believable reality. Cooper's dream was just that, a dream. The various supernatural figures that assisted Coop could plausibly be explained as the hallucinations of a highly talented, yet wildly eccentric detective with an extremely vivid imagination. Hell, I dream some wild shit if I drink too much coffee... Point is, Leland would have been caught anyway. I mean, in the case of real-life murders of women, especially sexually-motivated ones, the first people the police haul in for questioning are the boyfriend and immediate male family members - uncle, father, etc. Once again, until episode 29 made it explicit, it was not possible to say with certainty that the the Red Room, LMFAP, Giant actually existed.
In the case of shows that care for that brand of realism - like Broadchurch, which imho is a wonderful example of a more grounded Twin Peaks - nobody would've dared to set up a funeral before all forensic tests were done, for starters. Peaks went for a more stylized "We all killed her" and stuck to its guns... and had the victim herself reveal the truth.
What fuelled the show all along was character, not the anticipated resolution of a murder mystery. Watching this week's instalment reminded me of that more than ever. Of course we still have the random violence, the sub-Tarantino food-and-banal-conversation scene, the abstract weirdness and the Roadhouse with its hipster-douchbag clientele and hipster bands, but the two saving graces of this episode were Catherine Coulson and Wendy Robie. The Log Lady's final scenes were heartbreaking. As for Wendy Robie, it's often forgotten just how good she was in the original series and how much pathos she brought to the role. More that just a kook, she played Nadine to perfection as a frightened, insecure, largely tragic character. Always second in her husband's affections to the glamorous blonde. Nadine's attempted suicide in S1 is incredibly sad. In this latest episode, she didn't disappoint. The resolution to the Ed and Norma story may have been rushed and a little trite, but Robie again played Nadine to perfection - an eccentric, a frightened little girl in a grown woman's body - but fundamentally a good person with a good heart who was finally able to come to terms with her life. The fact that characters like this were in short supply in this series makes me sad. Such a waste, such a missed opportunity.
Maybe that's what the girl in the roadhouse was about to do when they cut away from her.
